Squeek for O SX?

[Luciano Ramalho]

On sexta-feira, novembro 15, 2002, at 07:31 PM, Joel Braverman wrote:

> Is there a native versio of Squeek in the works for OS X Aqua?
>
> Joel

As a MacOS X 10.2 user, I've been very happy using the port described  
as "MacOS 7.5 through 9.2 Classic, and MacOS X (Carbon and Cocoa)"  
which can be found at http://www.squeak.org/download/index.html . The  
file I've downloaded can be found at:

ftp://st.cs.uiuc.edu/pub/Smalltalk/Squeak/3.2/mac/Squeak3.2-4956-MacOS- 
Full.sit

As for Aqua support, I'm no guru, but my understanding is that we will  
never see it in Squeak, for the same reason we don't have native UI  
widgets in any of the supported platforms. A key idea of Squeak is to  
have it's entire environment written in Squeak itself, in order to  
allow anyone to study and modify anything in the system. Native widgets  
are, by definition, not implemented in Squeak...

When I learned Java in 1996 I remember my frustration for being unable  
to subclass a listbox, for instance, to create my own special listbox.  
That was because in the AWT (the bad old Java GUI toolkit), all widgets  
were borrowed from the underlying OS, which made their implementation  
totally opaque, and subclassing impossible. To implement a new kind of  
listbox, I had to start with little more than a bare frame, and  
reimplement everything else. (The new Java UI toolkit, Swing,  
implements all widgets in Java itself. Swing has skins that imitate the  
GUI style of the most important OS's, but even then the widgets are not  
the real thing, and end users can usually tell the difference)

So although sometimes I wish Squeak could make it easier for us to  
create more standard UIs, I think the price for that is too high.  
Squeak is fun because it is completely malleable!

The commercial Smalltalks all use native widgets, but I don't know if  
any of them supports Aqua yet.

--
Luciano